Congressional Republicans say a whole lot of questions “need to be an swered” about an inspector general’s report detailing how the White House altered a scientific paper that it used to justify a controversial drilling moratorium after the BP oil spill last spring.

They’re right.

Almost from the moment the report was first made public, most of the scientists involved said it had been deceitfully edited to make it look like they’d endorsed the ban, which Gulf-state elected officials immediately denounced as a job-killer.

Now the Interior Department’s inspector general, Mary Kendall, has determined that those allegations are correct — and that the White House falsely applied a scientific veneer to justify what was clearly a political decision.

Which is precisely what eight of the 15 scientists involved called it when they publicly protested the editing.

“The secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct,” they said in a fax earlier this year to Louisiana’s governor and two US senators. “But he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions.”

Ironically, of course, it was candidate Barack Obama who accused the Bush administration of twisting scientific evidence; he promised, if elected, to be guided by “science, not ideology.”

And it turns out that this is just one of several instances in which the Obama White House has manipulated the word of scientific experts.

This time, though, the finding comes as Republicans are about to take control of the House. And Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), the likely new chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, says he wants to know “who at the White House actually rewrote the Interior Department document.”

Alas, the White House isn’t saying.

Instead, Team Obama — including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — is clinging to Kendall’s finding that there was no conscious effort to mislead the public.

But Kendall reached that finding by taking the word of “all DOI officials interviewed” who “stated that it was not their intention to imply that the moratorium had been peer reviewed by the experts.” A little too trusting, perhaps?